About Michael McCurdy

MICHAEL McCURDY was born in New York City in 1942 and grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He attended Marblehead High School and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (where for a year (1965-1966) his roommate was David McPhail, now the well-known children's book author and illustrator). Another future children's book illustrator, Wallace Tripp, shared the busy printmaking department with McCurdy and McPhail. Michael created his first wood engraving there in 1962. He was graduated as well from Tufts University in Medford, MA (B.F.A., M.F.A.), and in 1966 was awarded a traveling scholarship from the Museum School.

A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he worked for two years as an orderly in the orthopedic ward at Children's Hospital in Boston to fulfill his military obligation. When released from the hospital in 1969, he and his wife Deborah used his grant to spend nearly five months traveling throughout Europe and the Soviet Union.

Michael has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA 1966-1977), Concord Academy (Concord, MA 1972-1975), various adult printmaking courses in Concord and Lincoln, and at Wellesley College Library's Book Arts Program, 1976. He also has had many exhibitions of his work, and currently over 200 books contain his illustrations. He used to lecture extensively as well, but is not available now for such activities.

While publishing Penmaen Press Books (1968-1985), Michael produced significant small-press first editions by leading American and European writers and poets, including William Saroyan; Joyce Carol Oates; Howard Norman; William Stafford; Allen Ginsberg; Robert Coover; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Richard Eberhart; Maxine Kumin; Leo Connellan; X. J. Kennedy; Rosellen Brown; Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Sándor Csoóri; Richard Wilbur; Brian Swann; Robert Steiner; Anthony Hecht; Gerard Malanga; Philip Dacey; William Ferguson; and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Vicente Aleixandre.

Michael has illustrated books he has authored as well. These include Toward the Light (a collection of his wood engravings with accompanying anecdotes, published in Canada); The Illustrated Harvard: Harvard University in Wood Engravings and Words; The Devils Who Learned to be Good; Hannah's Farm: The Seasons on an Early American Homestead; The Old Man and the Fiddle, and Trapped by the Ice: Shackleton's Amazing Antarctic Adventure. He edited and illustrated an abridged version of Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, renamed Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass in His Own Words, published in 1994. His latest authored and illustrated book is, An Algonquian Year: The Year According to the Full Moon.

Michael's wood engravings and drawings are found in trade books for both adults and children and in fine limited editions. Major fine press letterpress editions Michael has illustrated include, The Winged Life: The Poetry of Henry David Thoreau (Yolla-Bolly Press, 1986 / reissued by Sierra Club Books); John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (Yolla Bolly Press / reissued by Sierra Club Books, 1988); and David Mamet's play, American Buffalo (Arion Press, 1992). He has also designed and illustrated the John Muir Library Series for Sierra Club Books.

Howard Norman's The Owl-Scatterer included Michael's engravings and book design and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Illustrated Children's Books of 1986. Ann Whitford Paul's book The Seasons Sewn: The Year in Patchwork received the same recognition from the Times in 1996. Michael's collection of engravings, Toward the Light, was awarded the Bronze Medal in an international book exhibition in Leipzig in 1983. Other books have received awards from the New England Book Show and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

McCurdy is included in

Who's Who in American Art, Who's Who in America,
Contemporary Authors, and Something About the Author.

He is listed in Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults
and Anita Silvey's Children's Books and Their Creators.

He was chosen a Literary Light for 2002 by the Art Associates of the Boston Public Library.

This site was last updated 12/12/07